Attributed to ALEXANDER HAMILTON, in a political argument with Thomas Jefferson.David S. Muzzey, An American History, p. 192 (1911).

For similar expressions of this idea going back to Horace, see Bartletts Familiar Quotations, 15th ed., p. 108, no. 19 and footnotes (1982), and The Home Book of Quotations, ed. Burton Stevenson, 9th ed., p. 148384, section 7 (1964).